Bible and Sword (20 page)

This tale, which soon spread among the Amsterdam Puritans, especially excited the members of the Millenarian sect, who were confidently awaiting the Kingdom of the Saints. According to their prevailing interpretation of Biblical prophecy the return out of exile must include the Ten Lost Tribes, who had seceded in the tenth century B.C. Only when they were reunited with the sons of Judah,
as they had been under David and Solomon, could the Messiah, the son of David, appear on earth.

Montezinos’ marvellous find was seized on by Manasseh as proof that the dispersion had indeed been accomplished “among all peoples” and thus as a signal that the time for the reunion of the Twelve Tribes under the Messiah was approaching. Was it not written in the Book of Daniel, “And when the dispersion of the Holy People shall be completed in all places, then shall all these things be finished”? Such was the thesis of
Spes Israeli
as Manasseh first wrote it in Spanish. But there was still one portion of the earth empty of Jews. The idea of using his thesis to secure the recall of the Jews to England evolved from Manasseh’s conversations with his Puritan friends. He rewrote his book in Latin, adding a dedication to “The Parliament, the Supreme Court of England, and to the Right Honourable, the Councell of State.” In it he asked for their “favor and good will,” so that “all those things which God has pleased to have foretold by the Prophets do and shall obtain their accomplishment … so that Israel at last being brought back to his owne place, the Peace which is promised under the Messiah, may be restored to the world.”

Encouraged in their hope of the approaching millennium, Manasseh’s English disciples had his book translated into English and printed in England, where two editions were rapidly sold out. It came at an opportune time. Cromwell was then engaged in a war with Portugal, the first in a long series of trade wars with Continental powers that the Commonwealth undertook to restore British maritime supremacy and repair broken trade ties with the colonies. During the prolonged struggles of the Civil War England had fallen ‘way behind in the powers’ competition for foreign trade. The business and commercial class, almost exclusively Puritan, was particularly jealous of the Dutch, who had seized the opportunity to push into first place in the Levant and Far Eastern trades and in the carrying trade with the European colonies in the Americas as well.
Dutch success was aided by the Jewish merchants, shipowners, and brokers of Amsterdam, who brought in business through their Hispanic and Levantine connections. Their value was not lost on Cromwell, particularly as there were several Marrano families in England who had already been of use to him.

The Marranos or crypto-Jews were refugees from the Inquisition who had settled in other countries, where they lived publicly as Spanish nationals practicing Catholicism in the embassy chapels while privately practicing Judaism in their homes. Traces of such families in London and Bristol can be found as early as the years immediately following the expulsion from Spain in 1492. In Cromwell’s time several prosperous Marranos were active in the City, of whom the most prominent were Simon de Caceres and Antonio de Carvajal. The latter was grain contractor for Cromwell during the Civil War and controlled most of the import of gold bullion from Spanish sources. His ships were expressly exempted from seizure during England’s war with Portugal and in fact were granted special facilities by the Council of State to continue their commerce abroad. Cromwell, plagued by “ship money” as much as Charles I had ever been, needed capital, which he hoped to get from the Jews. Also he believed that they could be useful to him as “intelligencers” whose connections, threading across Europe, would bring him information on trade policies of rival countries and on royalist conspiracies abroad.

Official contact with Manasseh was opened in 1650, soon after his book appeared. A mission to Holland headed by Oliver St. John, whose purpose was to negotiate an alliance with the Dutch, was authorized to treat with Manasseh on the side. St. John had several conversations with the Rabbi, with the result that Manasseh addressed a formal petition to the Council of State for readmission of the Jews to England.

Events were now hurrying to a climax. The proud and
prosperous Dutch rejected the upstart English republic’s offer of union. Thereupon the Commonwealth, operating on the principle, if you can’t join them, lick them, promptly passed the Navigation Act, which excluded foreign ships from commerce with England and her colonies. This hit the Dutch where they lived, and war with England followed within a year. Anticipating it, Cromwell, on the day after passage of the Act, sent Manasseh ben Israel a passport to come to England to advocate his cause in person. The coincidence in time, as Cecil Roth has pointed out, is worth noting. Cromwell was anxious for the transfer of the Amsterdam Jewish merchants to London as a measure that would benefit England in the trade race with Holland.

Before Manasseh could come over, however, the Dutch war erupted, and while it lasted no further action on his proposal was taken. If it could have been taken up at this time, the results might have been startling, for in the year 1653, with the calling of the Barebone Parliament, the “remarkablest” of the modern world according to Carlyle, the peak of Hebraism was reached. The little band of stern, impassioned men hand-picked by Cromwell convened on July 4, 1653 with the set purpose of so remaking England’s constitution as to put into actual practice Mosaic law and the pristine principles of Jesus. On the Exchange, in the courts, in the markets, the Englishman was willy-nilly going to love his neighbor as himself. It was, says Lord Morley in his life of Cromwell, an attempt “to found a civil society on the literal words of Scripture … the high-water mark of the biblical politics of the time.”

Cromwell himself was inspired by the mood, and in his opening speech to the Little Parliament he seemed almost carried away by a vision of himself bringing, like Elijah, a nation back to God. “Truly you are called by God as Judah was to rule with Him and for Him,” he told the members as they sat rapt in a sense of high mission and a historic moment. “You are at the edge of the Promises and Prophecies,” he went on, and quoted the Sixty-eighth
Psalm: “There it prophesies that ‘He shall bring His people again from the depths of the Sea’ as He once led Israel through the Red Sea. And it may be, as some think, God will bring the Jews home to their station, ‘from the isles of the sea’ and answer their expectations ‘as from the depths of the sea.’ “ And he rose in eloquence, quoting psalms and prophets in every other sentence and assuring his hearers that the triumph promised in the Sixty-eighth Psalm to God’s people of old would be realized by the Commonwealth, God’s people now on earth.

Had Manasseh ben Israel been in England to present his case to men thus exhorted, what might not have happened? But in the little space of six months they were finished. Their earnest, hopeless effort to put Scripture into practice was denounced as a “judaizing” of English law, and having clashed with property rights it went down to inevitable defeat. Cromwell himself, standing on the spot where he had said they were “on the edge of Prophecy,” summarily dismissed them. They have come down in history as an object of ridicule typified by the nickname taken from one of their members, Praisegod Barebone.

Although the peak of Biblical Puritanism was now passed, the issue of the Jews’ recall was not dropped. The Dutch war was over, but the Spanish war, another matter of trade rivalry, was in the offing. Cromwell still pressed for a decision on the Jews, whose mercantile connections with Spain and Portugal remained close. In 1654 Manasseh sent his brother-in-law, David Dormido, and his son to present his petition to the Council of State. Because of opposition among his own people, who cleaved to the orthodox Jews’ position and sternly disapproved any human efforts to hasten the Messiah’s coming, he felt obliged to lie low for a while. But when the Council, despite Cromwell’s request for “speedy consideration” and “all due satisfaction,” rejected Dormido’s petition, Manasseh decided, on Cromwell’s urging, to come over himself. Accompanied by three fellow rabbis he arrived with new arguments
for his cause, ready written in a
Humble Address to the Lord Protector
. In it he gave the rabbinical weight of his authority to the argument that the Jews were scattered throughout the world “except onely in this considerable and mighty Island” and “that before the Messiah shall come and restore our Nation, that first we must have our seat here likewise.”

Next he took up “profit which is a most powerful motive” and pointed out how useful the Jews could be as channels of influence in trade vis-à-vis Holland, Spain, and Portugal. He stated the affection in which the Jews held the Commonwealth because it offered more toleration than monarchies. He answered familiar accusations with the remark that Christians themselves were accused of blood rituals by Roman emperors and pointed out the uncomfortable truth that “Men are very prone to hate and despise him that hath ill fortune.” Finally he specifically asked for protection by the government, a “free and publick” synagogue and cemetery, freedom to trade, civil jurisdiction by the Jews over their own community with final appeal to the English courts, and abolition of any existing laws that might disallow any of the foregoing.

Publication of the
Humble Address
provoked a tumult of controversy in which the pros were loudly outpamphleteered by the cons. All the old charges were revived and some new ones, including the charge that Cromwell was a Jew and that the Jews were going to buy St. Paul’s and the Bodleian Library. They were an ignoble race whom even God had constantly to chastise for their wickedness; their exile was divine punishment for the killing of Christ (and the Puritans would reap the same punishment for killing King Charles); if recalled to England they would vilify the Christian religion and cause a movement away from Christian principles and customs, falsify coinage, create unemployment, ruin English merchants, and destroy foreign trade. Advocates, on the other hand, maintained that the Jews were “the most honorable Nation of
the world, a people chosen by God”; that the high priests only were responsible for the crucifixion, not the Jews as a nation; that their return to England would “bless” the country; that the Civil War had been God’s punishment on England for the expulsion of His people and that the recall would appease His wrath and bring peace; and that the Jews as merchants would lower prices and increase trade and prosperity, for it was well known that “those nations who treat the Jews best flourish most and abound in wealth and strength.” Chiefly, however, the advocates based their case on its weakest point: the argument that only by bringing the Jews to England could their conversion be accomplished. The opponents, led by the bitter, brilliant William Prynne, whose
Short Demurrer
is an archetype of the rest, ridiculed the idea of the Jews’ ever being converted, on which point, of course, they were right. The whole thesis of the Jews’ convertibility, which was to reappear so strongly in the nineteenth century, was totally unrealistic. Yet, ironically, it was the strongest of all the motives that conditioned England to promote the restoration of Israel.

Be that as it may, at Whitehall on December 10, 1655 Cromwell convened a special committee of judges, clergy, and merchants to consider Manasseh’s petition. In the following fourteen days’ debate the delegates, who were about evenly split pro and con, wrangled to a stalemate. But on one point at least a clear conclusion was reached. Cromwell had laid down the agenda: “Whether it be lawful to receive the Jews,” and “If it be lawful, then upon what terms is it meet to receive them?” On the first question Justices Glyn and Steel handed down the opinion that there was no legal bar to the readmission—a great point gained. But as to terms under which the Jews could take up residence in England there was, as Cromwell scolded, “a babel of discordances.” The clergy, most of whom favored readmission, argued that “The good people of England did generally more believe the promises of the calling
of the Jews and more earnestly pray for it than any other nation,” and should admit them in order to bring about this “calling” or conversion. Moreover England should atone for its past cruelties to the Jews, who had indeed been invited in by William I, the more so as “We are children of the same Father Abraham, they naturally after the flesh, we believers after the spirit.”

The merchants were adamant against it. Rumors of sinister results that would follow readmission had been spread both by Dutch and Spanish agents, who understood its purpose as aiding the Navigation Act, and by Royalist agents, who hoped to thwart it because “the Protector was earnestly set upon it.” Influenced by these rumors, the merchants predicted the direst results, insisting that Jewish trade would enrich foreigners and impoverish England. As for conversion, they said, the people were so prone nowadays to run after strange new doctrines that the Jews would probably make more converts to Judaism than the reverse. Finally the only agreement that could be reached was a resolution permitting the re-entry, but under such disabling trade and financial restrictions as would have made it useless to Cromwell.

The door was flung open. In stalked the Protector, disgusted once more with the inability of human weaklings to come to the point, to get action, to see what he wanted and let him have it. Was it not, he berated them, every Christian’s duty to receive the Jews into England, the only nation where religion was taught in its full purity, and “not to exclude them from the light and leave them among false teachers, Papists and idolaters”? This argument silenced objectors among the clergy. Then he poured his contempt upon the City men. “Can ye really be afraid that this mean and despised people should be able to prevail in trade over the merchants of England, the noblest and most esteemed merchants of the whole world?” “Thus he went on,” says an observer, “till he had silenced them too.… I never heard a man speak so well in his life.”

But Oliver had had enough, and he dismissed the shamefaced committee as he had dismissed the Long Parliament and the Little Parliament when they could not serve his purpose. Actually he had secured part of what he wanted in the judges’ decision, and he was probably not anxious to push the matter farther for fear of stirring up more agitation. Students of the episode agree that Oliver had probably made up his mind to accomplish his purpose more or less unofficially and to allow the re-entry, as a contemporary said, “by way of connivancy.” In fact, this was the impression at the time. “Now were the Jews admitted,” wrote the diarist John Evelyn on December 14, 1655, apparently in reference to the judges’ admission of no legal barrier.